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Introduction

This book is an account of the literature and culture of death and mortality in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London as it relates to the broad theme of governance. It takes as its focus a body of writings in several different genres circulating in England’s capital between the 1380s, a generation after the Black Death, and the 1530s, the first decade of the English Reformation. I argue that the schooled awareness of mortality was a vital aspect of civic culture, critical not only to the individual’s experience of interiority and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, institution building, and the government of the city itself. At a time when an increasingly laicized religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal and cultural enrichment, and sometimes with violent political change, having an educated attitude to death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense.

In fifteenth-century London, as elsewhere in northern Europe, a complex of new ways of representing, preparing for, and even undergoing death gained enhanced cultural power, informing the behavior and perceptions of the city’s citizens and institutions and acting as key public markers of responsible civic engagement and identity. During the period between the accession of Henry IV in 1399 and that of Henry VII in 1485 in particular, when the confidence of the city and its governors was at its height, death discourse was one of the most visible features of London public culture. Death was understood by a broad spectrum of the city’s elites as a generative force: one capable of providing vital personal, institutional, social, and literary as well as religious opportunities. A new understanding of death as an ars or “craft,” something to be learned and managed, also made possible new techniques of self-examination. Intrinsically affective, these techniques in turn made personally intimate the turbulence of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century transformations in the religious and political culture of city and realm.

My book explores the particularities of London death culture in relation to a series of vernacular texts, the earliest of which is The Visitation of the Sick, an anonymous work from around 1380 that may be northern Europe’s first vernacular guide to the deathbed, and the latest A Preparation to Death, a translation of Erasmus’s De praeparatione ad mortem, also anonymous, printed in 1538. Reading image-texts such as the Daunce of Poulys and literary texts such as Thomas Hoccleve’s Series alongside deathbed manuals, meditations, tribulation treatises, catechetic instructions, almshouse ordinances, and wills, I also attend to the books in which such materials circulated, to the institutional contexts that gave them purchase, and, where possible, to identifiable readers, most of them male members of London’s lay elite. Since London’s literary and religious culture evolved rapidly during this period and was exceptionally open to international influence, I track cultural and religious change on the European, as well as English, stage and the role played by death texts of French, Italian, German, and Austrian origin in the metropolis and among those who lived and died in it. Taking its cue from the medieval Christian understanding of death itself, as an event most straitly bounded in time and space yet also a portal to the infinite and eternal, my book affirms the indissolubility of the secular and the sacred in the public culture of fifteenth-century London and argues for the importance of taking their interpenetration seriously.

Learning to Die in London is the first book-length study of the English ars moriendi during the long fifteenth century and contributes to a surprisingly small body of specialist literature on the subject.¹ This does not mean that the topic will seem unfamiliar to medievalists or, indeed, to early modernists. On the contrary, it seems to attach so naturally to the period as hardly to need discussion. It is a truism that, in the centuries after the European Black Death of 1348–50, death became a focus of special intensity even by the standards of an era for which it was always a preoccupation. Figured by the skeletons that occupy the lower compartments of “transi” tombs or link bony hands with representatives of the “estates” of late medieval society in the Danse macabre, death functions as a potent symbol of the period’s difference from the modern.

Occasionally, this difference is seen in positive terms. For example, in Eamon Duffy’s well-known study of fifteenth-century religion, The Stripping of the Altars, the communal orientation of late medieval death culture grounds a lay religiosity centered on the rhythms of parish life, as part of the concerted attempt made by late medieval moral teachers to persuade the laity of the transience of earthly pleasures and goods and the need to seek eternal salvation at all costs.² Like Philippe Ariès in Homme devant la mort (translated as The Hour of Our Death),³ Duffy emphasizes medieval death culture’s longue durée, focusing on the most slowly changing aspects of what he calls “traditional” practice, especially the Latin liturgical Ordo ad visitandum infirmum (visitation of the sick) and the rites of burial, requiem, and commemoration or “mind” that followed, during the century before these were disrupted by the English Reformation.

More often, however, even in recent work, late medieval death culture is quite casually understood as obsessive or morbid: the product, as Johan Huizinga asserted nearly a century ago, of “deep psychological strata of fear” of death on the one hand and “a kind of spasmodic reaction against an excessive sensuality” on the other, on the part of a culture that, in some accounts, was itself morbid to the core.⁴ The sheer elaborateness of late medieval death culture, its masses, chantry chapels, purgatory visions, its focus on inculcating penitence, fear, and contemptus mundi provides scholars of secular culture with a further reason to avoid engaging with religion and scholars of medieval religious culture with a reason to prefer different topics. Outside medieval studies, the topos that Renaissance or Reformation modernity was born from a repudiation of the death “fixation” figured by these phenomena—that modernity embraces life, where the medieval embraced death—often goes unquestioned even by scholars of the early modern phases of the ars moriendi tradition itself.⁵ In recent decades, social historians and art historians have begun to work behind the clichés grounding these generalizations, producing local analyses that seek to take the variety of late medieval practices and representations of death on their own terms.⁶ In other medieval disciplines, including my own field of literary studies, a tendency to think of death practice and attitudes as static and generalized persists.

Pointedly avoiding discussion of morbidity and the “macabre,” then, I aim in this book to offer more nuanced ways to read textual representations of death produced during the course of the long fifteenth century. I read these representations less as the unconscious expression of a mentalité or shared psychic state than as “polemic and argumentative … rooted in historical contingency,” as Sarah Beckwith memorably did for images of corpus Christi nearly twenty years ago.⁷ Death is at once a natural fact and acculturated through the human production of meaning. Death discourse bridges this world and the next, evoking an urgent concentration on temporal bodies, eternal souls, and their prospects in situations whose intensity tests the limits of reason, discipline, affection, and belief. Death discourse also bridges self and community, the personal, familial, and civic, seeking to channel this intensity to productive ends. By examining the period’s most influential cultural forms of death in a specific locale, and by exploring the effects of these forms, I mean to show that the period’s imaginations of death are intentional and mobile, in dialogue with and responsive to doctrinal, social, and economic change.

In focusing on a series of Middle English death texts circulating in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London, I am concerned primarily throughout with the larger role the artes moriendi—understood very broadly as texts that offer or depict a way of dying well—play in the public culture of the city. The geographical focus is intentionally limited. An increased interest in the ars moriendi in the fifteenth century was a European phenomenon. My focus on London is not intended to suggest otherwise, but instead allows for textured analysis of the forms and functions of the genre in a limited area across a 150-year period. It also enables me to contribute to our knowledge of late medieval London.⁸

Like other cities, London had special reasons to engage in public, as well as private, reflection on death and mortality. Urban crowding meant that life expectancy was likely to be lower than elsewhere, even as urban wealth guaranteed influxes of new residents: in the demographically reduced but far richer city of the postplague era, funerals might outnumber births. As “Troynovaunt”—the city mythically founded by Brut after he fled from the old Troy—London was much aware of its survival beyond the lifetimes of individual generations of citizens and took care to ensure and represent its own longevity, both artistically and through institution building.⁹ Like its public art, most of its churches, almshouses, prisons, hospitals, roads, drains, and urinals owed their existence to the huge charitable bequests contemporary death practice expected of wealthy citizens and to the legal maneuvers that preserved the fortunes made in life by those who were now corpses through “perpetual” corporations. But as a prototype of the New Jerusalem, which understood even the mayoral justice dispensed at the London Guildhall as an image of divine justice, it was also much aware of its own earthly mortality.

In this wealthy, devout, and heavily laicized context, a number of the traditional functions of the ars moriendi acquired a newly honed importance. Death provided the occasion for the penitential inculcation, often through literary texts, of the ascetic mindfulness, moral discipline, and acts of charity that the transcendent reality behind it required even of the city’s worldliest citizens, informing the behavior of specific individuals of wealth and power such as Richard Whittington, moneylender to the Crown and three times the city’s mayor, in definite ways. It allowed executors and others a means of renewing the city’s charitable institutions and the cityscape as a whole, using moneys from testamentary bequests—whose principal aim was to speed wealthy merchant donors through purgatory—to creative new ends, such as improving the quality of the city’s religious education. It offered the opportunity for imaginatively rich ethical reflection, in poetry and public art, on the tragic nature of temporality for a mercantile community perpetually bound, like London itself, to Fortune’s wheel. As a ground of homiletic instruction in several textual and visual genres, it acted as a spur to social differentiation and community discipline.

Although the study covers a wide range of vernacular texts, it focuses substantially on seven death texts in common London circulation. Three of these are deathbed manuals: the Visitation of the Sick (c. 1380); The Book of the Craft of Dying (c. 1430), a translation of the Tractatus de arte bene moriendi (c. 1420); and, more loosely, Erasmus’s Preparation to Death (printed 1538). Two are treatises on death meditation: Henry Suso’s Learn to Die (c. 1335), available in English to Londoners as part of the Seven Points of True Love (c. 1390) and in Hoccleve’s verse version that forms the climax of the Series (c. 1420); and Richard Whitford’s Daily Exercise of Death (printed 1534). Two are more miscellaneous: the series of wall panels known as the Daunce of Poulys, its text based on John Lydgate’s Dance of Death (c. 1430s), itself based on the Parisian Danse macabre; and Thomas Lupset’s A Treatise of Dying Well (printed 1534), an oration on overcoming fear of death by remaining mindful of it.

Discussed in rough order of circulation and reading history, rather than composition, these texts and the works with which they traveled or are associated tell a layered story about changes in what constituted the “good death” in London from 1380 to 1540 and imply a larger account of parallel changes in the city’s religious, literary, and political culture across this period. The theme of continuing cultural change comes especially to the fore in discussing the establishment of early fifteenth-century death culture in Chapter 1 and its successive transformations in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Chapters 4 and 5.

For much of the book, however, I am concerned not with what these texts tell us about changes across time but with an interest they all share: the role of death preparation in forms of good governance, that is, in the virtuous ordering of the polity, and the importance of a proper attitude toward mortality on the part of subjects and their secular and religious rulers. In focusing on this theme, I am indebted to James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution, whose model of late medieval English society as structured according to a complex “set of adjacent, interdependent, and competing jurisdictions” I have found productive throughout this study.¹⁰ But I am also following the lead of the death texts themselves, all of which have intrinsic relationships with fifteenth-century “feudal, civic, and religious” structures of governance, participating in important ways in real world struggles for authority or in the literary imagination of legitimate jurisdiction.¹¹ The first three chapters of the book in particular are loosely organized around a specific model of governance well known in late medieval London, and ideally suited to discussion of the various “jurisdictions” that influence and are influenced by the ars moriendi and their complex interplay. This is the tripartite Aristotelian model that seeks to relate three principal arenas of political and ethical action: the self, the household, and the city.

The synthetic approach to self-government, domestic government, and civic government integral to Aristotle’s Politics was regularly invoked in discussions of politics from the early thirteenth century on, in the many academic commentaries on the work, in the late fourteenth-century French translation by Nicole Oresme, and in Latin and vernacular treatises written under Aristotle’s influence.¹² As described in John Trevisa’s translation of Giles of Rome’s late thirteenth-century De regimine principum, The Governance of Kings and Princes (1390s), self, household, and city are tightly integrated locales in which forms of control and rule, rightly practiced, together produce a harmonious and virtuous polity. Following Giles, Trevisa divides his work into three books, beginning with “how the kynges majeste, and so how everiche man, schal rule hymself,” that is, with the branches of governance known as “ethica and monastica”; continuing with “how a [he] schal rewle his meyne [household],” that is, with “Iconomyk, a sciens of housbondrie”; and concluding with the “parfite” topic of “how a schal rule a cite and a regne,” that is, with “politica.”¹³ My own analysis does not follow what Trevisa calls his “resonable and kinde” order, since it makes best historical and expository sense to begin with the second term, “Iconomyk, a sciens of housbondrie.” As Trevisa later defines it, this is the rule “eche citeyn” should exercise over “his owne hous and maynye, not onlich for [because] suche reulyng is his owne profit but also for suche reulyng is i-ordeyned to þe comyn profit, as to þe profit of regne and of citee.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, I stay close to the central insight and demand of this Aristotelian system, that the areas in which “governance” is practiced are at once separate and integrated, and attend often to the demands such an ethical politics imposed, even as I also explore the limits of its reach.

As Sarah Rees Jones has demonstrated, London governors made a concerted effort in the fifteenth century to make the household a subset and arm of the city’s governing structure, “a place of good government in which the harmonious ends of civic government might be achieved.”¹⁵ In a recasting of an old system of local governance known as “frankpledge,” whose origins are Anglo-Saxon, adult male householders were made legally responsible for the physical well-being and good behavior of their familiae, which included not only their natural kin but also those living in under their roof including servants and apprentices.¹⁶ In particular, fifteenth-century London householders were expected, as Shannon McSheffrey has shown, to monitor and regulate the moral and sexual conduct of their dependents and servants.¹⁷ Several of the books containing a version of The Visitation of the Sick discussed in Chapter 1, some from London, others associated with the West Midlands, seem to have cognizance of this developing system, extending it in certain cases to give householders similar responsibility for their tenants.

The majority of the artes moriendi treated in this book appear in at least one manuscript or printed book addressed to a householder audience, suggesting that part of the householder’s newly intensified role as moral overseer also extended to the end of life of his dependents. Despite the wholly masculine deathbed scene depicted on the front cover of this book, documentary evidence suggests that women did the actual difficult work of looking after the physical needs of the sick and getting the dead ready for burial. However, it seems that, at least ideally, the head of the household exercised moral governance over the dying, supporting Felicity Riddy’s suggestion that, at the fifteenth-century sickbed, “the physician counsels, the sovereign—the person in charge—issues precepts: the nurse … gets on with the business of care.”¹⁸ In crucial ways, moreover, overseeing the death of a dependent as represented in these household books appears to be unlike many of the other duties assigned to the London householder, for it is understood as a spiritual responsibility, overlapping significantly with the spiritual jurisdiction of the priest. This enlargement of lay spiritual jurisdiction explains, for example, the frequent appearance of the “E” version of the Visitation of the Sick alongside works that deal explicitly with the broad responsibilities of the householder. Although this is for several reasons a complex case, it may also explain the frequency with which surviving copies of The Book of the Craft of Dying, the death text discussed in Chapter 4, contain ownership inscriptions from late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century guildsmen and members of the urban gentry.

Governance of the self through ethica monastica (personal ethics) is also an important object of interest for fifteenth-century artes moriendi and tribulation texts, certain of which develop ascetic praxes derived from monastic or eremitic literature, including meditatio mortis and other imaginative forms of self-negation. Newly translated and adapted for use by a lay audience, monastic praxes shape an inner, lay asceticism, responsive to the desires of pious, educated, and privileged lay Londoners to participate in the perfectionist life of enclosed religious. The presence of the death text central to Chapter 3, Suso’s Learn to Die, in a number of lay manuscripts of the later fifteenth century and as the climactic element in Hoccleve’s Series is one sign of the spread of this ascetic-derived lay religiosity; Whitford’s repurposing of his Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, originally written for the Syon nuns, for lay householders is a second; in another register, Lupset’s understanding of the scholar’s life of court service as a potential philosopher’s martyrdom in the Treatise of Dying Well is a third. While the artes moriendi that support household governance enlarge the jurisdiction of lay male household heads, ascetic death texts counsel meditation on the ephemerality of the body and the social and temporal world, nurturing continence and inwardness. In practice, however, and particularly toward the end of the period, these two modes of death text often travel together, as interlocking elements.

The most “parfite” and demanding of the modes of governance outlined by Trevisa, the rule of “citees” and “regnes,” supposedly both supports and depends on the other two—and the most spectacular manifestation of London public death culture discussed in Chapter 2, the Daunce of Poulys, indeed works precisely to reinforce the proper rule of self and household as a means to strengthen and sustain the civic body. In the Daunce of Poulys, the undifferentiated language of spiritual equality in the face of death that belongs to traditional death discourse (“death the leveler”) retains its affective force, as dying representatives of each estate, joined hand in hand each with its own death and with one another, face their common end together. Yet the city governors had a particular investment in perpetuating an image of the city as a mortality community, as they encouraged London’s inhabitants to embrace virtue and avoid vice—including vices that transgressed the city’s laws and economic order—in order to die well, even if taken suddenly by death. In principle, they also worked to internalize the ethical understanding of the political integral to Aristotelian political thought within their own professional and household circles, as becomes clear from the emphasis on right rule in the extensive library owned by the most prominent of these governors, John Carpenter.

A public spectacle of death even more effective than the “daunce” in inculcating virtuous and lawful behavior in the city appears in the sixteenth century, now overseen not by a city functionary but by those of the Tudor kings, in the shape of the remarkable increase in public execution of felons and traitors at Tyburn and other busy London gallows. Here, the Aristotelian model spectacularly breaks down, as a different strand of ethical thought, the Stoic, a constant in artes moriendi from The Visitation of the Sick on, comes to the rescue, now in order to help readers face not merely the fortunes of lay living and dying in a general sense but the urgent and specific experience that is death at the hands of the tyrant. Even here, however, the integral relation between the ars moriendi and governance holds. While only one of three main artes discussed in Chapter 5, Whitford’s Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, actively works to protect the household as a locus of governance, the sudden rush of new arts of dying appearing in print through the 1530s discussed here all take care to include meditations involving state execution into new paradigms of urban death preparation.

My focus here on London and on governance thus allows me to trace in detail some of the ways in which death discourse is implicated in the literary, political, and religious culture of the city and responds to changes in each. My contention throughout is that developments in death discourse are related to wider cultural developments and that death discourse was an active and still comprehensible component of long fifteenth-century thought, society, and belief. The language of morbidity, obsession, decadence, and trauma has no useful place in its historical analysis. While the ars moriendi may seek to move and disturb, it always has definite ends in view. Far from seeing the ars moriendi emerge from this analysis as a symbol of medieval alterity or the exhaustion of the fifteenth century, if we track its place within its cultural and representative order, we find the period more available to understanding, not less.

There remains the possibility that the special interest in death in long fifteenth-century art and literature bears a direct relation to the Black Death of 1348–50 and its several successors, a possibility that usually in some way underlies the “morbidity” thesis. Unforgettably evoked at the beginning of Boccaccio’s Decameron, plague is the explicit backdrop to a select number of literary representations of death, including Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, the apocalyptic final passus of Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the Parisian Danse macabre, painted facing an overflowing charnel house.¹⁹ Developing out of the author’s unusual desire to experience “a bodelye syekenes … so harde as to the dede,” including the final rites, Julian’s Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and Revelation of Love may reflect the enhanced awareness of death on the part of those, like her, who had lived through the plague.²⁰

Although all these examples save one belongs to the fourteenth century, the Black Death was vividly remembered in fifteenth-century London, not least because of the ways in which it materially and symbolically shaped the cityscape. The spate of fifteenth-century almshouse building in fifteenth-century London touched on in Chapter 2 need have no relation to plague and its memories. But in the course of this book, we visit two of the city’s pardon churchyards—emergency cemeteries where Londoners who had died unconfessed were buried, their sins forgiven by special dispensation—both of them key cultural sites associated with the plague: the first connected with the sacred and heavily politicized space around St Paul’s, the second with the London Charterhouse, symbol of the city’s devotion to the ascetic ideal, outside the walls at Smithfield and near the ancient hospital of St Bartholomew’s.

I do not dismiss the Black Death hypothesis, even if I suspect that the major effects of the plague on late medieval urban death culture had as much to do with shifts in the relationship between the clergy and the laity after the deaths of so many ministering priests, or with the new concentration of urban wealth enabled by population reduction and enhanced social mobility, as with the long shadow of the terrible event itself.²¹ Yet to treat the plague as a singular cultural trauma is to seal off late medieval death discourse both from other periods of history and from a fluid and constructive relationship with long fifteenth-century culture itself. Besides, literary and visual imaginations of death are hardly confined to the fifteenth century. Death is at the theological center of Christianity, and mortality is a preoccupation in insular vernacular literature from the Anglo-Saxon period onward. As we see in Chapter 1, many devotional and ritual practices associated with the ars moriendi predate the Black Death by hundreds of years.

Moreover, the ars moriendi flourished for centuries after the plague had become a distant memory. Sophisticated literary artes moriendi appear for at least three centuries after the genre’s emergence into the vernacular in the late fourteenth century, from John Donne to Jeremy Taylor and beyond.²² A major recent study of the American Civil War traces the art of dying as a praxis, still recognizably connected to its medieval predecessor, into the mid-nineteenth century.²³ The ideal of the “good death,” central to the ars moriendi, has become a controversial issue in contemporary hospice care.²⁴ If anything, the ars moriendi is a sign of cultural continuity across the centuries, not disjuncture. As we see in Chapter 5, the attempt to distinguish the postmedieval ars moriendi from its medieval predecessor by arguing for an epistemic transformation is untenable. The densest cluster of original vernacular death manuals discussed in this book belong not to the fifteenth century but to the 1530s: the beginning, in the cultural imaginary, of Western modernity. Moreover, the appearance of three new and popular ars moriendi within a decade has nothing to do with the natural disaster of the plague, but appears to be a response to human actions, as another kind of public manifestation of mass death appears in the form of judicial executions.

Most important for my purposes, however, making too direct a causal association between fifteenth-century death culture and the Black Death does not allow for a differentiated and flexible analysis of the complex cultural forms in question: it shuts down the conversation. Study of London’s innovations in representing death illuminates several processes of cultural change, centrally, as I argue, in relation to government and, in the broadest sense, jurisdiction. Here I will mention two others, both of current interest. One is the process of laicization: the pronounced shift of emphasis toward the laity and their concerns that is one of the best-known phenomena of the decades after the Great Schism of 1376, generating much of the vernacular theology produced in late medieval England and Europe. In the three decades from 1380 to 1410, an important face of laicization in England was the radical political and theological agenda associated with John Wyclif, fiercely critical of monasticism and the secular church and demanding a reorientation of authority in the church, effectively, around lay elites.²⁵ But Wycliffism was not the only reformist force of the period, and laicizing reform survived the movement’s suppression, taking on and making mainstream parts of its agenda as it went.²⁶ The Visitation of the Sick itself, especially in its expanded rewriting for wealthy lay users, circulated in early fifteenth-century London books whose contents are inflected by Wycliffism but whose agenda is in tune with the normative, and increasingly confident, lay religiosity of the period.

Despite the presence in the city of impressive numbers of highly educated rectors, cathedral canons, and other religious,²⁷ important aspects of the spiritual life of fifteenth-century London were in concrete ways in the hands of its civic governors. For reasons explored in this study, the discourse of death was one of their basic resources. Baptism, the Eucharist, confession, and other sacraments, including the unction given the very ill: all these moments of sacramental contact with the transcendent required a priest. In the practices we see emerge in the Visitation of the Sick and other accounts of the deathbed, the “good death” that all serious Christians hoped to achieve did not. Laymen could and should attend the deathbeds of other laymen. Moreover, because the laity lived their lives in intense contact with the “world”—from a monastic viewpoint they were the world—their death, although in one respect spiritually worrisome, was for that very reason also an area of especially intimate concern and focus.

A second aspect of cultural change illuminated by analysis of London’s vigorous investment in death and dying is the city’s internationalism. Much the nation’s largest commercial and political center and the heart of its book trade, London was a key point of collection and distribution for new insular texts and ideas. But the city’s close connections to other urban centers in Continental Europe also made it easy for it to remain abreast of fashions in the discussion and representation of death as they developed rapidly in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Bohemia—part of a wider turn toward the pastorally oriented religiosity that characterized the period between the reformist activism of the Council of Constance in 1414–18 and the advent of Lutheranism a century later. Even as they engaged with the long-lasting implications of the insular reformism associated with John Wyclif, the city’s early fifteenth-century governors, spiritual and political, were aware of Continental reformers like Jean Gerson, Bernardino of Siena, Johannes Nider, Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, and Jan Hus, and movements like the Observant Reform and the Devotio Moderna. In the early sixteenth century, Luther’s works were read, and indeed publicly burned, in the city within a few years of their writing, while the web of trading connections between the city and Continental Europe, not least in connection with the book trade, made efforts to prevent their circulation an exercise in futility.

A few privileged Londoners—including some who were neither citizens nor governors but rather members of the class that Rosemary Horrox, in a classic article, has defined as “urban gentry”²⁸—had early knowledge of the fifteenth-century Continental best seller Tractatus de arte bene moriendi through its English translation of around 1430, The Book of the Craft of Dying. Hoccleve’s Lerne to Die may be an early response to the growing devotional prestige of Suso’s Horologium sapientiae among the early fifteenth-century French aristocracy. The Daunce of Poulys, commissioned by the city’s common clerk John Carpenter, may have been in place within a decade of the Parisian Danse macabre itself, the earliest of hundreds of European imitations of that artwork. Carpenter’s extensive library included a copy of another kind of death text, Francesco Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, a handbook for wealthy laymen struggling to keep their lives, and souls, intact in the face of the unpredictability of fortune: the most renowned of many works circulating in London inflected by Christian humanism (and, through it, Senecan Stoicism) that helped establish the reciprocal relationship between learning to die and living in the world that is a signature of London lay death discourse. At the end of the period covered in this book, Erasmus’s De praeparatione ad mortem was written as the result of a commission from Thomas Boleyn, the father of Anne Boleyn, and translated within four years into English for London publication.

The public culture that emerged around death in long fifteenth-century London was sophisticated and richly multivalent: admonitory and celebratory, penitential and sumptuous, communitarian and hierarchic at the same time. As the ordered and articulated depiction of the professions in the Daunce of Poulys suggests, dying in the fifteenth century had become an increasingly imbricated social practice in which distinctions of lay status were reinforced even at the moment of the dissolution of the individual self. With energetic, self-aware, and paradoxically positive intensity, death discourse informs and reflects the living interests and concerns of the city, its citizens, and its rulers. The picture darkens as the fifteenth century, and the book, moves forward. Based on a Latin work produced as part of an early fifteenth-century reformist counterattack against heresy and moral decay, the Tractatus de arte bene moriendi, the Craft of Dying introduces a note of spiritual anxiety and, perhaps, exclusivism to the English deathbed, while more secular professional and physical anxieties are at play in the death texts of the 1530s. Yet the core function of the ars moriendi, to make the fact of death productive, comprehensible, and tolerable within a given cultural system, remains. Death itself changes across the course of the period I describe; the necessity of learning to die does not.

Chapter 1, “Spiritual Governance and the Lay Household: The Visitation of the Sick,” works closely with a group of little-studied texts, including the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum from the Sarum rite, the “A” and “E” versions of The Visitation of the Sick, and the didactic treatise The Fyve Wyttes, to lay out the particular model of laicization on which the more specifically urban and socioliterary studies that follow depend. During the late fourteenth century, the deathbed became the key site at which a model of Christian community increasingly independent of the sacramental apparatus that had long surrounded dying was performed. The Visitation of the Sick (c. 1380) provides a glimpse into this phenomenon. Combining two early twelfth-century Latin texts, the Anselmian Admonitio morienti and the De Visitacione infirmorum by the humanist abbot and archbishop Baudri de Bourgueil (1045/6–1130), the shorter Visitation A provides a text useful for lay and clerical deathbed attendants, introduces an affective and Christocentric theology not part of the Latin ritual, and reconfigures the relations between the dying person and the officiant around the humanistic discourse of amicitia. Grounded in the theology of the “corporal works of mercy,” the longer Visitation E introduces into the egalitarian ideology of the deathbed community a new emphasis on social hierarchy, as the responsibilities of temporal lordship extend to the deathbed itself. In a series of books containing Visitation E, several connected to London, the deathbed becomes a site of spiritual governance by privileged laypeople, making possible lay participation in the “mixed” life usually assigned to bishops.

Chapter 2, “Dying Generations: The Dance of Death,” takes up the link between mortality and government described in Chapter 1 to discuss how London’s common clerk John Carpenter (d. 1442) exploits orthodox death discourse both to commemorate the former mayor Richard Whittington (d. 1423) and to perpetuate an image of the city as a mortality community. Rather than being used for remembrances in the form of the obits that prayed so many other successful merchants through purgatory, the moneys left by Whittington to pay for postmortem works of mercy funded a set of building projects, including an almshouse, a college of priests, and a library, that significantly recast older religious forms with lay Londoners’ edification in mind. As Whittington’s main executor, Carpenter masterminded both these projects and the smaller ones that made the Whittington arms a ubiquitous feature of the cityscape. As common clerk, he also used the city’s moneys to fund other death projects. Chief among these was the Daunce of Poulys, a public artwork inflected, like the Whittington projects, by the laicized reformism exemplified by Visitation E but also indebted to a second, humanist tradition that understands the value of death preparation in specifically this-worldly terms. I suggest that the ethos of the Guildhall, especially its joint concern with the city’s longevity and with its virtue, found expression in the Daunce of Poulys. Offering an image of community that emphasizes diversity, temporality, and social hierarchy even in the face of death, the placement of the Daunce of Poulys defends civic society’s interests in the precinct of London’s cathedral.

Chapter 3, “Self-Care and Lay Asceticism: Learn to Die,” turns from household government and civic government to self-government, focusing on the meditations on mortification and death that became integral to the specifically laicized forms of asceticism practiced by privileged fifteenth-century Londoners, on the role of voice in these meditations, and on their functions in creating personal identities characterized by forms of spiritual elitism. The chapter reads two groups of texts circulating in London manuscripts, both of which feature versions of the “learn to die” chapter from Henry Suso’s mid-fourteenth-century Horologium sapientiae. The first group, found in a well-known series of manuscripts owned by a group of wealthy London families, includes Pety Job, a Middle English long lyric poem based on the nine lessons from the Book of Job in the Office of the Dead; Twelve Profits of Tribulation, a fifteenth-century prose translation of the late thirteenth-century De duodecim utilitatibus temptacionibus; and the Middle English prose Suso translation taken from the Seven Points of True Love. Collectively, these texts offer wealthy Londoners a means to turn success and failure, pleasure and suffering, into the ascetic experience of tribulation, mortifying their secular urges and fostering both the ideal of patience and a new, distinctively fractured mode of subjectivity.

The second group consists of the first three items in Hoccleve’s last major poetic achievement, the Series (early 1420s)—the Complaint, the Dialogue, and an amplified verse translation of the death chapter of Suso’s Horologium sapientiae called Lerne to Dye—which together represent a similar construction of an ascetic identity through the contemplation of adversity and death. The Series is often read as Hoccleve’s attempt to be reaccepted into the London literary and political community from which he had been exiled by illness. I suggest that these three sections of the poem instead sketch a program of interior asceticism and conversion that rests on the public continuation of his break with society. At the household and civic level, death discourse retained much of its traditionally communitarian emphasis. At the personal, penitential level, as Hoccleve shows us, it took on individualizing properties, shaping the soul so that it need not rely on the prevalent economy of purgatorial prayers and indulgences. Dying to the world on a daily basis, the inward ascetic Hoccleve draws on what David Lawton has called the “public resources for interiority” offered by mortification discourse, transforming the experience of social alienation and self-fragmentation into the foundation of eremitic and prophetic speech.²⁹

The first three chapters all focus on the first five decades of the fifteenth century, the decades of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Carpenter, of the building of the charities associated with Whittington, and of the intensive circulation of The Visitation of the Sick. Chapter 4, “Wounded Texts and Worried Readers: The Book of the Craft of Dying,” an account of the origins, contents, and social contexts of The Book of the Craft of Dying, begins to move the discussion toward the end of the century. A close Middle English translation of the enormously popular Latin Tractatus de arte bene moriendi, the Craft of Dying may have been produced as early as 1430 but mostly circulated, almost exclusively in London manuscripts, between the later fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The Tractatus is a thoroughly rewritten and vastly expanded version of the final part of Jean Gerson’s pastoral treatise Opusculum tripartitum (1405–14), a work written to support the work of secular priests and to standardize the pastoral care associated with the deathbed. Perhaps produced in the environs of the University of Vienna during the difficult years surrounding the heresy trials and burnings of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, the Tractatus is informed by Gerson’s fierce reformist energies, but focuses, unusually, on a split lay and monastic readership, insisting on the spiritual capability and responsibility that individuals in both communities have to help their colleagues die. In enjoining the lay user to behave like a monastic and the monastic user to behave like a virtuous lay person as he or she shapes a mors provisa, the work reflects the mix of conservatism on the theological level and innovation on the ecclesiastical and practical levels characteristic of the Continental Observant Reform movement and the great councils of Pisa and Constance with which it is associated.

Chapter 5, “The Exercise of Death in Henrician England,” examines the English death culture of the 1530s, the first decade of the English Reformation. In his Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben (Sermon on Preparing to Die), Martin Luther argues that fear is an improper emotion to feel at death, since it betrays a lack of belief in Christ’s conquest of sin and human suffering and in one’s own election. Instead of feeling contrition for sin, the dying should feel triumphant, directing attention only to Christ’s triumph over death; disassociating themselves from any sinners, living or dead, they should anticipate joining directly, with no interval for purgatory, the saints who are already with God. Luther’s revision of death preparation into a single focused cultivation of faith in Christ’s saving grace is directed toward alleviating fear born of worry regarding the proper interior experience of repentance, the spiritually advanced but debilitating fear that was a by-product of the antiformalist and perfectionist tendencies of fifteenth-century death manuals such as the Craft of Dying.

The desire to combat fear is also the focus of the death texts by Richard Whitford, Desiderius Erasmus, and Thomas Lupset, the most popular original artes moriendi to appear in print in English during the reign of Henry VIII. Each of these, first published in the 1530s, ran through more than one edition, and each offers itself as countering fear as the most common and crucial obstacle to dying a good death. Although they continue the earlier works’ interest in the relation between outer form and inner experience, however, these writers are less concerned with forms of perfectionist fear—fear of inadequate contrition or lack of passionate love of God—than with the basic and “natural” fear of physical death. These texts provide new models of death, ones that point to changes in London’s, and England’s, public political and religious culture. As Erasmus writes in the preface to A Preparation to Death, learning to die is enormously important, “for this is of mans lyfe the laft part (as it were) of the playe, wherof hangeth eyther everlastyng blysee of man, or everlastynge damnation.”³⁰ In all three texts discussed here, learning to die is presented for the first time as taking place not only in the domestic space of the household but in public view: as a spectacle scripted by a human author, not a divine one; a “playe” on a stage, watched by a strangers in a crowd, not a ritualized natural event in a sickbed.